Bowen · 1929
Elizabeth Bowen and *The Last September*
In the spring of 1929, in the writing-room of Bowen's Court, the Anglo-Irish Bowen family estate at Farahy near Kildorrery in north County Cork, Elizabeth Bowen, thirty years old, the only child and heir of the Bowen-family seat, completed her second novel *The Last September* (Constable, London, September 1929). The novel is set at a fictionalised Bowen's Court (called *Danielstown*) during the summer of 1920, in the final months of the Anglo-Irish War before the July 1921 truce and the December 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty. The novel's nineteen-year-old protagonist, Lois Farquar, the orphaned niece of the Naylor family of Danielstown, lives through the summer of 1920 in the Big House's distorted social-routine while the IRA columns are burning Big Houses in the surrounding countryside; the novel closes with the burning of Danielstown by the local IRA flying-column in the autumn of 1920, a fictionalisation of what was, in plain reading, the Anglo-Irish-class-fate of the Bowen's-Court generation of small country-house gentry. *The Last September* is, by every careful judgment of twentieth-century Anglo-Irish literary criticism (Hermione Lee, Roy Foster, Maud Ellmann), the foundational novel of the Anglo-Irish Big House tradition and the pre-eminent fictional treatment of the Anglo-Irish War from the Big-House side.
It is twenty past three on the afternoon of an unrecorded April day in 1929, in the writing-room on the first floor of Bowen's Court, the eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish family-seat at Farahy near Kildorrery in north County Cork, in pale Munster spring light through the south casement. She is twenty-nine years old (she will be thirty in June). She is Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen, born at 15 Herbert Place, Dublin, on the seventh of June 1899, only child of the Anglo-Irish barrister Henry Cole Bowen and Florence Colley, schooled at Downe House Kent, married 1923 to Alan Cameron the Northampton-Education-Authority Director of Education, in her sixth year of published prose career since Encounters (Sidgwick and Jackson, 1923).
On the desk in front of her is the finished manuscript of the second novel The Last September, three hundred and eighteen pages of foolscap typescript with the pencil-corrections of the final-revision pass. The novel is set at the Bowen's-Court family seat in 1920, during the Anglo-Irish War: the fictional Danielstown estate of the Naylor family, the nineteen-year-old niece Lois Farquar, the British army officers visiting the Big-House social-routine while the IRA columns are burning similar Big Houses in the surrounding country.
She thinks: the Bowen's-Court of the summer of 1920 (when I was twenty, before my Oxford and my London-marriage years) is the period the novel records. The novel is, in plain reading, the Bowen's-Court I have been writing-myself out of for the past nine years.
She thinks: the burning of Danielstown in the closing pages is the fictional version of what did not, in fact, happen to Bowen's Court. Bowen's Court was not burned by the 1920 IRA. About a hundred and fifty-nine Anglo-Irish Big Houses were burned in the Munster and Connacht of 1920–23. Bowen's Court was, by the luck-of-the-local-IRA-column composition (Tom Barry's West-Cork column did not extend to the Mitchelstown-Kildorrery country, which was Liam Lynch's East-Cork column country and which followed a different burning-policy), spared. The novel imagines the burning as it might have been, and would, in plain reading, have been.
She thinks: the novel is, by my private intention, the Anglo-Irish family-class-elegy for a class that knows, in 1920, that it is finished. The Treaty of 1921 and the Free State of 1922 and the Land Acts of 1923–33 will, by the political-economic settlement, end the Anglo-Irish Big-House gentry as the political-economic class within a generation. The novel is the elegy for the class as it knew itself in the summer of 1920.
She sends the manuscript to her London publisher Michael Sadleir at Constable in the late April 1929. The novel is published on the twenty-eighth of September 1929 in a first edition of two thousand five hundred copies; the edition sells through by the Christmas of 1929 and a second edition of two thousand is printed in January 1930. The reception, by the 1929 reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman, and the Manchester Guardian, is uniformly admiring; the novel is, by the 1929 Times Literary Supplement of the second of October, the most accomplished second novel by an Anglo-Irish writer of the present generation.
Elizabeth Bowen continued at the front-rank of twentieth-century English-language fiction (the novels include The House in Paris 1935, The Death of the Heart 1938, The Heat of the Day 1949) until her death at the Pelican Hotel in Hythe Kent on the twenty-second of February 1973, seventy-three years old. She is buried at Farahy churchyard, ten yards from the Bowen's-Court site (Bowen's Court itself was, by her 1959 financial-difficulty-sale to a small-farmer who demolished it in 1960, lost; the house no longer exists). The Farahy parish church and the Bowen's-Court walled-garden are, in 2025, in the care of the Elizabeth Bowen Society of Ireland.